Tending souls

But before they could reach the road joining up with the main Colombo-Galle highway, north of Galle, they heard rather than saw the tsunami wave sweep across the road. His sister turned back, but Suresh walked on. On the outskirts of Galle, he found the body of a young boy wrapped around a tree ——the first of many hundreds he was to see over the next three days, and within hours, was digging graves to bury the many who had died without knowing what hit them.

‘‘For years all I wanted to be was a priest,’’ he said. ‘‘I went to a seminary not too far from here and for the first two years enjoyed my life as I was doing what I wanted most —— to be near my God. Yet I felt something was not quite right. My mother had died and I felt that somehow I was not meant to be a priest. I was also envious of the freedom my old school friends.’’

Suresh admits it was a hard, but honest decision and left the seminary to live at home with an ageing father and sister. That was two years ago. Now he walks between Galle and Unawatuna about 15 kilometres east along the road, helping others collect bodies. These are loaded onto the back of trucks and carted to the hospital mortuary for identification and then taken to be buried in mass graves. Everywhere is the stench of death. In a way, it has hardened him to the human suffering around him.

He is no longer worried that he collects bodies of those who might have been his parishioners had he become a priest. He shrugs it off. People in shock from having lost everything means nothing.

‘‘We all have to move on in life,’’ he comments with a shrug. ‘‘Today, I am a gravedigger and earn more than selling curd in the market. Who knows what I’ll be when all this is over. I am not doing it by choice, or even because I want to, but it is a way of earning a living. Someone has to do it.’’

He estimates that he has helped carry more than 500 bodies to one grave or other since Sunday morning and possibly a further 300 to one of the trucks to cart bodies to one of the temporary mortuaries set up in nearby Galle. ‘‘I don’t look at faces to see if I know them. After a while your mind shuts off from the recognition thing. That is the way it is; it’s another body,” he said.